Friday, 22 March 2013

The almost forgotten plan by the Royal Mail
to look for alternative premises – possibly in an existing shop – so that it
can economise by closing the Wide Bargate main Post Office, was dragged back into the limelight this week.
The
Boston Standard launched a petition when the news was announced, and
proudly told us that it had garnered “more than 150 signatures.”Hmmm.Last time the Standard played the petition game was when Boston Borough
Council announced its intention to charge disabled blue badge holders to
park.Without even a blush of
embarrassment, a reporter presented just 27 – yes, 27 – protest coupons
from readers … and if that wasn’t bad enough, three were from readers outside
the borough - including one from as far away as Kent. There is a time to hand in petitions,
and there is a time not to. And when the best a borough with a
population of 65,000 can come up with is a meagre 150 votes against the post
office plan, the better thing to do is to keep stum. Such a poor level of
opposition to the post office proposal sends
a simple and plain message; go ahead with the closure, the locals don’t give a
monkey's.

﻿

If you’re a busy man in the world of
politics, it’s sometimes easy perhaps to lose track.So we can understand if voters in Fishtoft do
a double-take at an item of campaign literature

Councillor
Singleton-McGuire – who is alsothe Lincolnshire Council Councillor for
Fishtoft, as well as being the parish
council chairman, has mailed stay-at-home voters to tell them that they will shortly
be receiving their postal ballot paper “for the local Boston Borough Council elections on May
2nd.” Come again, Councillor? Unless you know something we don’t
know, Boston Borough Council won’t be up for re-election until 7th
May 2015.Whilst it’s good to hit the
ground running at election time, it’s also helpful to know in which direction you’re
travelling. Isn’t it?

And talking of elections, we note the announcement
of the vacancy for the Staniland South
seat on Boston Borough Council, which became vacant on the death of Conservative
borough Councillor Paul Mould last month. To glean this information, you have
to visit the “public notices” section of the Boston Borough Council website to
be told: “To call an election a request must be made in writing to the
Returning Officer at the address below by TWO electors within the principal
local authority area.” No closing dates are given for this. In fact we know
that this has been done, because at least one candidate has come forward, and
we are sure that there will be more – but it seems almost as though the council
would have liked it to slip by unnoticed.No date has yet been announced for the
election but the odds are that it will coincide with the County Council
elections on Thursday 2nd May – principally because it’s cheaper that way.
It’s impossible to say whether or not this is a good move. A local council
contest in isolation might not draw much interest – but if more people are
minded to pitch up for the county council event, it may improve the turn-out.

Perhaps it’s because an election is in the
air, but have you noticed that in this week’s local “newspapers” there are more letters
from our local councillors than you can shake a stick at. The Boston Standard has letters from 21 local
councillors – if you count one from the 17 strong “Conservative
Group” and anotherfrom the three “Boston
Labour Councillors” – whilst the Boston
Target has letters from another six councillors. The Tories seem
particularly anxious at this time to let us all know how unafraid they are, and
what amazing achievements they have accomplished. Wethinks the Tories doth protest
too much, to paraphrase Hamlet – although there is much that is hammy about their
performance. More on elections next week.Last time we wrote about the lack of surgeries held by our Boston Borough Councillors, we mentioned the decline of the roving surgeries staged by Labour group members of the council. However, we’re told that the last one was held in January, and the next will be tomorrow. You can buttonhole your councillors in Staniland North Ward between 10am 11am when they will be touring Fydell Street, Ellen Close, Granville Street, and Bartol Crescent. And they will be in Skirbeck ward from 11am until noon, covering Kings Crescent, Kings Avenue, Church Road, Kitwood Close.

A couple of weeks ago we mentioned the poor
turnout at a meeting arranged in a Stickford pub to discuss the European Union.
It was organised by East Lindsey District Councillor Victoria Ayling, with
Bostonians especially in mind. Clearly, although no one else was much bothered
about the subject under discussion, Councillor Ayling,who was East Lindsey’s portfolio holder for
Corporate Affairs, - and who came within714 votes of ousting veteran MP Austin Mitchell at the 2010 general
election battle for Grimsby – has much
stronger views that perhaps some people thought.Last week, she jumped ship from the Tories to UKIP,
saying she could no longer serve Lincolnshire residents under David Cameron as
leader.

We’ve mentioned Boston Business “Improvement”
District a couple of times this week, and will have more to report ahead of
their annual meeting next Tuesday. In the meantime, we were interested to note the
following announcement at last month’s BID board meeting: “The decision was
taken that BID
would run the 2013 Christmas market and the Chairman was already
looking to attract an A list celebrity to switch on the Christmas lights.”
This strikes us not only as a tad presumptuous – as others had a say in last year’s event – but potentially
risky. An event such as a Christmas market needs a lot of money spending
up front … particularly if star names are involved. What if the BID does not win the
September ballot for a second five year term in office?It’s possible that it could have splashed out
several thousand that might not be refundable, and therefore end up coming out
of the pockets of local businesses. The only way to avoid such a potential
calamity would be to wait until the result of the ballot. In that event it
would be fartoo late in the day to arrange anything very special, as
most stallholders would have booked elsewhere, as would the cast of Emmerdale
Farm. Yet again, the BID looks guilty of not thinking things through properly.

Some good news for Boston for once in terms of
winning back a service that was to have been taken away. In July last year East
Midlands Ambulance Service proposed the closure and sale of dozens of ambulance
stations to improve its performance times, which were among the worst in the
country.The idea was to replace the
region's 66 current ambulance stations replaced with 13 larger "hub
stations" and more than 118 "tactical deployment points." And,
as is so often the case these days, there were no plans to include Bostonas
oneof the hubs. However, in a
revised plan announced earlier this week, the new idea is for 16 hubs and 108
smaller community ambulance stations – and with Boston being included among the
hubs. Let’s hope that this new recognition of Boston as somewhere worth serving
is set to continue.

We mentioned the Boston Standard earlier in the blog, and we have to congratulate
them on an ingenious
way to win an award. The paper devoted a third of its front page –
and the sole report on page 11 – to tell readers that it had scooped three press awards.
It won “Title of the Year,” “Best use of digital platforms” and Small weekly
title of the year” at an awards ceremony in Peterborough. The event?The inaugural Johnston Press Awards – organised
by Johnston Press for newspaper members of … you’ve guessed it … the Johnston
Press Group. Not too hard to succeed somewhere there, we imagine. Perhaps the “small
weekly title” referred to the dwindling readership. Soon, we plan to
announce the Boston Eye annual blog
award which will be given to blogs published about Boston which have the word “Eye”
in the title. We feel that we have a good chance of success.

Finally, we were tickled by the sign
pictured below which we saw in a car park off Wide Bargate.

The name Robin Hood
conjured up the outlaw’s memorable policy of stealing from the rich to give to the
poor.Exactly the reverse of
Boston Borough Council’s parking policy – to take from the poor to give to the rich!

You can write to us at boston.eye@googlemail.com
Your e-mails will be treated in confidence and published anonymously if
requested.

1 comment:

I am sure I read details relating to the vacancy of the Staniland South seat in the Boston Standard either the edition of the 13th March or the 20th. Probably the latter. The date of the election relating thereto was mentioned also.

About the author

is written and edited by retired Lincolnshire born writer and broadcaster Malcolm Swire, who was brought up in London, where he began his career in journalism.
In the 1960s he joined the Boston Standard before returning to London to write for the UK’s national news agency, the Press Association – then based in Fleet Street.
He returned to Lincolnshire –where his family history goes back more than a century – in various public relations roles, before becoming a founder member of BBC Radio Lincolnshire,where he created the station's Go for Gold appeal,which raised hundreds of thousands of pounds for local charities.
Over the years, he read the news, presented programmes and retired from the BBC as the station's Programme Organiser and Deputy Managing Editor.
He started the Boston Eye blog in February 2007 and has vowed to continue until Boston Borough Council's leadership is all that it should be!
He has dug in for a long wait!